Here, I Made This for You

After selling two novels, the author of Waiting for April refuses to give up on number three, thanks to a pep talk from Auburn football great Ace Atkins.

"So constant is the effort it seems almost gentle."

Why he wrote the last line: The idea was simple: Write a book I'd actually like to read.

It strikes the funny bone, to hear or say: "I want to write a book I'd actually like to read." Because if the person saying that is a published writer, the question is, what the heck have they been doing until now?

Every writer knows the answer. They were learning and imitating and paying homage to influences. My first published novel, The Total View of Taftly, was a heavy-handed, clumsy compliment to Barry Hannah. My second, Waiting for April... well, a tangle of influences there, and within that briar patch the desire to come up with an intricate, well-plotted story. I managed that, I think, but the competing voices could not be quieted, and there were far too many saccharine dollops of nostalgia to make for a good meal. And yet those problems did not amount to the principal flaw.

The principal flaw was that neither of those books sounded like me. Neither of the voices I used in those novels contained much of my own voice. They weren't natural. I held back, which meant I had two books that, whatever their merits and shortcomings, were simply not the kind of books that thrilled me as a reader. I wanted to write a book that thrilled me. So why couldn't I just go ahead and do it? As it turns out, there are a lot of reasons.

Primo, stark fear. The stakes are the highest when you really lay it on the line. What if you fail? If you fail when you know you're just warming up, you can shrug it off. When my first two novels got bad reviews, I could smile and think, hey, that ain't me you're talking about. But if you really give the best and most personal you have you make a target of your heart.

I was working out at the gym one afternoon in Oxford, Mississippi, where I was living at the time. My workout partner was Ace Atkins, the former Auburn football superstar who made the cover of Sports Illustrated and then became a big-shot writer, one of the rare ones who has both readers and critical acclaim. I was manhandling a pair of twenty-pound dumbbells, trying not to notice that Ace was working over a pair of fifty pounders while giving me advice. He was basically saying that the idea of delivering the best you've got was scary. "I mean (curling as if it were a pleasure), what if you get rejected? What if it gets panned? You've got nowhere to hide."

Ace was right, of course, but at a certain point, you begin to feel terror if you don't go for it. I was feeling that terror. I stood there and tried to look calm and did another curl and thought: I'm dying, or at least I will be dead within perhaps forty years, and I haven't written anything that I'm happy with and will obviously not be joining the Mr. Olympia circuit anytime soon and my gosh, WTF, I'm standing here like a jackass with a dumbbell in my hand.

Kierkegaard maintained that purity of heart is to will one thing. When my father told me that in high school, I immediately applied it to girls. But you get older and life whacks the stuffing out of you and so you come to an assertion like that and finally understand it.

After college, I went to Oxford, England to study under the philosopher Richard Swinburne, but my scholarship fell through and the small family business my parents ran went bust. I arrived in London late at night, took the train to Oxford, got cursed out by the gatekeeper of Oriel for waking him, dragged my bags to my room, sat on the bed and knew for a certainty I'd be going home within months. No money, no Brideshead Visited, much less Revisited. I couldn't study. I rowed crew because someone told me I was supposed to. I saw pretty English women and was too shy to say anything and blamed them for it.

And I started writing a novel. With my world falling apart around me, I learned the solace of building another one. I put all I had into it. Professor Swinburne expected me to turn in a polished, fifteen-page paper each week on subjects such as quantum mechanics and God. I remember there was an imaginary train skipping along at the speed of light somewhere and all sorts of puzzles about what would happen if God popped an imaginary passenger on the head with a miracle. That's not a very accurate description of what I was studying, but it perfectly captures my jumbled state of mind.

When I bounced back home, I finished the novel. The manuscript wound up in the hands of a prominent reviewer in New York who thought highly of it, and suddenly I was thinking, maybe I should be a writer. I left his office convinced I was presently to become an enfant terrible, drunk at Elaine's and celebrated. But the novel was never published. I started another one. At which point I started trying to be a writer, trying to learn things, to imitate, to figure out the craft -- all necessary stuff but in the end deadly.

Years later, after publishing two books, that first story continued knocking and I decided it was time to pick it back up. I'd changed too much to rewrite it. Instead, I took the basic scenario and main characters and started over.

Four years later, I had a 1,000-plus-page manuscript called Gaines Green, and for the first time I had something I liked. In most of those pages I encountered a voice that at last sounded like me. For better and for worse, I was all over that book. And it felt great. It's not that I thought Gaines was magnificent or important, but I enjoyed it. I'd enjoyed making it, and I enjoyed reading it. Though it was the hardest work I'd ever done, it was also by far the most pleasurable. I'd set forth a clear aesthetic standard and much of what I'd done either met or came close to meeting that standard. I wasn't going after any criteria of excellence -- I was just trying to make myself a book I'd like to read and to nail down a voice that was truly mine.

I eventually whittled Gaines Green down to just under 800 pages and sent it off for professional opinions. And that was when things got complicated.

My mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. All the time I'd been working on the novel, I believed I was racing against the clock and feeling intense anxiety over some countdown the ticks and tocks of which I'd begun to detect standing in the gym with my twenty-pound dumbbells. This was something different. This was real.

I stood with my sister and father staring at my mother while she slept after the first round of surgery and thought: I've been a child about almost everything and I can't believe this and I want my mother back. I didn't want to be strong for her. I didn't want to be noble. I wanted the cancer to undo itself and for things to go back to normal and for her to not look so damned exhausted and old and for me to be able to get back to that place where I thought it was brave and meaningful to write a book.

I sat with her each time she went into the "chemo lounge" to have her "chemo cocktail." As she went through treatment, she became pretty invested in the idea that my book would soon be published. She'd long wanted to go to Sea Grove and Seaside, two beach towns in the Florida panhandle. During the ravages of chemo, they took on the aura of paradise for both of us. I promised to take her with money from my advance. We began to talk of getting Gaines published and going to Seaside incessantly. My mother kept asking me to go to the computer room at M.D. Anderson and check my emails. Tubes running out her arm, she'd smile and say, "Go check your email! We're going to Seaside!"

But we were not. My novel was rejected when not simply ignored. I was broke. I could not get us there. After the chemo, after more surgery, the oncologist declared that my mother was cancer free. The chemo had aged her right onto the Astroturf that surrounds freshly dug graves, but after a few months she was possessed of a stunning radiance. And as she grew stronger, she became ever more convinced that I couldn't give up on Gaines. My father felt the same way. As did my sister. As did my brother-in-law. And the many friends who'd supported and encouraged me about the novel began weighing in on the matter, and they began doing so aggressively. I told people I thought my days as a writer were over. It had been too long since I was last published. I didn't have an MFA job. I wasn't in the loop. I'd finally written the best book I could and it had been rejected all over NYC. There was nowhere to go. And if there was anywhere to go, the smart money would be on putting Gaines aside and starting something new.

Then I thought, wait. Your mother just survived cancer. You said you would do anything for her. You said you just wanted her to know how much you love her, and in a way you wanted to express how much you love life and all the dizzy, fragile strength that comes seeping up when you least expect it. Your mother wants you to give it another shot. She doesn't know anything about editors and agents and the way things work and you said you didn't care about any of that anyway. Didn't you, Scott, say to hell with all that if you could just do something good for once?

So I rewrote the book this past year. With an eight-to-five job, plus teaching a few classes, it took a lot to get it done. A lot. I felt a little crazy, and according to my girlfriend, I was. Weeks passed in this sweltering haze and often I found myself simply unable to talk to people in any acceptable way. That or I was jittery and manic. All day sitting in a little office, but every minute really has been spent in my story.

I just sent it off to an agent. It's a totally different story now. The criteria changed. I wasn't trying to write a book I wanted to read anymore. I was trying to offer up a gift. I was trying to say thank you. I wanted to hold the new Gaines Green out to my mother and father and sister and brother-in-law and girlfriend and all my truly amazing friends and say with that purity of heart Kierkegaard wrote about: "Here. I made this for you."

About the author: Scott Morris is the author of The Total View of Taftly and Waiting for April. His latest novel, Gaines Green, is set in contemporary Central Florida, and told from the perspective of a narrator who loathes golf, Disney and developers.

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